Franklin D. Richards · 1856 October General Conference · 1856-10-05
Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 4, pp. 114-119 (delivered October 5, 1856). Richards had just returned from presiding over the British Mission and overseeing the emigration that season, including the disastrously late Willie and Martin handcart companies. His discourse described the handcart enterprise and called for saints to rescue those still on the plains. Pitman shorthand report; the speaker did not review this text before publication. Text transcribed from the printed JD.
Full text of the discourse as published in the Journal of Discourses. BYU ContentDM's item-detail page currently fails to render in modern browsers (loads, then a client-side script redirects to the generic lib.byu.edu collections page; reproduced 2026-06-30, site-wide BYU bug, not link-format specific). Re-promote to preferred/source_url once BYU fixes this.
Digital transcript referencing JD Vol. 4.
Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 4, page 114. Currently the only reliably clickable link for this talk; BYU ContentDM is the institutionally preferred citation but its item pages are currently broken client-side (see the BYU witness note).
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the IA/weebly witnesses; confirmed clean, no changes needed.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: speaker, date, page range (JD 4:114-119), and opening/closing sentences independently confirmed verbatim against jod.mrm.org. No text changes needed; talk boundaries clean.